Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Stax - a Platform for Java Applications in the Cloud

Stax Networks recently launched their Stax product into a private beta.

Stax is a platform for developing, deploying, and managing Java applications built around Amazon EC2 and S3 services.

The approach used by the platform seems fairly intuitive and straightforward:
  1. Generate an application using one of a number of templates.
  2. Download the generated application source code to a local machine for development.
  3. Update the app as needed.
  4. Upload the local copy to the server - that will get the application deployed to "production".
A few highlights:
  1. Versioning is supported so that a rollback to a previous version of an application can be executed if a bad version was deployed.
  2. MySQL databases can be created and used as needed.
  3. Grails is listed as one of the supported technologies - currently with "experimental" tag.
The service seems to be in the same market segment as Google App Engine, which currently doesn't have Java support but does plan to add it.

I would guess the success of the platform will largely depend, execution aside, on the pricing strategy, which I assume is to be defined/refined closer to the final release or public beta phase.

2 comments:

Vaibhavi said...

Hi all,

I am working for a software integrator company. My projects includes working on Java and Ruby on Rails and Ajax. I think Web Services is really cool. We also recently have to now work on REST and they are talking about mashups and Struts. Can anyone tell me if there are some good training or conferences so that me and my team members can get to speed with these technologies. Learning from books is not my cup of tea, even not when I was doing engineering ;)

All the help that group members can provide in this regard is much appreciated.

Thanks,
Vaibhavi

anaz said...

Hi Vaibhavi,

There are several online resources available that you just google for. If any of your team like to read then quality books from wiley and oreilly cover such technologies in detail.

I also highly recommend you could attend the upcoming Great Indian Developer Summit (http://www.developersummit.com) that is covering Java, Agile, REST, JAX-RS, mashups, .NET, Rich Web, JPA, SOA, rich user experiences, Spring, Groovy and more. They have most of the creators of these technologies as speakers. My team is attending this summit 22-25 apr at IISc campus where we are attending the web conference on April 23 and java on April 24. We have been able to get very good discounts. Maybe all those who are interested from your group can sign up together and get a good bargain from them. what say? I also attended last year's conference and had a really cool time.

In Hyderabad there is Sun Tech Days with some sun speakers.

Thanks,
Anaz